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[moocowmoo]

I want to see a comparative analysis of Tropes vs Men in Romance Novels. Maybe Romantic Comedies worth a look too.

[Putnam]

Romance novels are a niche genre. Video games are an entire medium.

[Fenrir]

I want to see a comparative analysis of Tropes vs Men in Romance Novels. Maybe Romantic Comedies worth a look too.

The point you seem to be missing is that those media which portray women unfavorably are worse than those that portray men poorly because they reflect and affirm a harmful conception about women that exists in our society. Men are secure in their capabilities and need not fear exclusion or harassment. Women have not this luxury.

[Mephansteras]

The whole point of the discussion is to bring to light Sexist attitudes that pervade society. A given game or scenario might not be sexist on it's own, but the prevelance of that situation in a majority of games shows the underlying sexism.

Like this example from the 50's

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The situation taken alone isn't necessarily sexist, but the underlying connotations from the time period are. The 'women' are in the kitchen doing dishes while the 'men' are relaxing after dinner and playing games. The attitude at the time was very sexist, and even though it might be fair to say that the father worked all day and it was effectively the wife's job to do house chores, the fact that the boy gets to play games while the girl does dishes shows that the message being taught is that this exact scenario is how things should be. It's not like the boy did anything different at school than the girl to justify getting to play games while she does dishes, but since that's how the adults divide labor that's what the kids get taught.

Bringing awareness to issues is how you start changing them. We don't need laws to get the game industry to change, we just need people to actually notice what's really going on and not just accept things as 'the way they are'.

[Solifuge]

Spoiler: Ugh... feel free to gloss over this. It just needed to be said (click to show/hide)

All right.  Do you know of any trans female main characters outside of dating games?  I don't. 

I'm fairly certain there's been a couple of text-based ones along those lines. I mean, like one or two. Then a single-digit amount of experimental stuff related to it. From what I remember at least one or two of them were pretty specifically done by the MtF trans game developer whose name I've forgotten. One of her games was that female-protagonist upward scrolling jumpy thingy from a few years back. Pretty damn rare stuff, though.

Color me impressed =)  Also, I wouldn't take Persona as a dating sim, no--I'm really trying to specifically eliminate characters who solely embody fetishism.

Corruption of Champions is one such text game: with the right potions you can genderswap or become just about any imaginable trans / straight / gay / bi combo you like.

Corruption of Champions is a hugely-fetishistic erogame about intersex demons and animal-people raping and gangbanging one another. I wouldn't call it trans-friendly either, since the character-creation process was all about your physical sex-organs, and how massive and amazing they were.

So yeah... if you step back a few yards and ignore how it completely fails to represent intersex people in a light that doesn't embody them as a fetish, how it discards the notion that physical sex and gender identity are two very different things, and glossed over the rape overtones and other deeply-squicky shit... you could argue that it's a sex-positive game featuring hermaphroditic characters? At best? Instead of a deeply offensive piece of glorified rape-fiction?

Seriously.

Also, consider this a piece of advanced warning. It was gross and it pissed me off, as an ally and even just as a person. And those are not easy things for fiction to evoke in me.

[Flying Dice]

I want to see a comparative analysis of Tropes vs Men in Romance Novels. Maybe Romantic Comedies worth a look too.

Fenrir already hit this, but it deserves thorough coverage. Harmful representations of women are problems because they reinforce existing societal biases. Similarly harmful representations of men are much less serious because, even if someone makes a joke about men being terrible with directions or emotional interaction (etc., etc.), men are still an "alpha" class in our society and are rarely/never denied (either explicitly or implicitly) an opportunity because of their sex.

[Loud Whispers]

Bringing awareness to issues is how you start changing them. We don't need laws to get the game industry to change, we just need people to actually notice what's really going on and not just accept things as 'the way they are'.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[It's been changing for a long while now, again, already not accepted because it's damn silly otherwise].

[Willfor]

I agree that it has been changing recently, but it has only been changing because now there are a bunch of people trying to actively point it out. There is still a large cross section of designers who are uninformed, publishers who shrink back the moment anyone mentions changing the status quo, writers who rely on hack conventions and stereotypes that were outdated thousands of years ago, and gamers who circle the wagon any time anyone even thinks of criticizing their precious industry.

Said the designer, "Equality is already here, so it doesn't matter if we don't actively try to reach out to women. Besides, one designer can't make a difference anyway."
Said the publisher, "No one will buy a game with a woman as the protagonist. Also, sex sells, so let's make the game appeal as much to undersexed grognards as we can!"
Said the writer, "I'm not even going to try to understand how to write a woman character, I'm just going to do it like I've seen all my other [male] writers do it."
Said the gamer, "They're trying to take away our funs again!"

Not all of these can be true in every case, but at least one of these is true in so many cases now when it's brought up that it still makes awareness of the issues important. This issue won't be over until this stops happening so often. This needs to happen in every single medium.

[penguinofhonor]

grognards

I learned a new word today.

[Loud Whispers]

I agree that it has been changing recently, but it has only been changing because now there are a bunch of people trying to actively point it out.

To say so would be completely ignorant of the fact that consumers find the exact strawman you present distasteful. Consumers are not idiots that have to have some enlightened soapboxer pointing out the obvious.

[Vector]

Reelya, scientific evidence has said that women emit poisonous gasses around their periods.  Scientific evidence has implied that autism is caused by vaccines.  Scientific evidence gave us The Bell Curve, which you just cited, and which has been soundly debunked.  It's given us the notion that women go insane because of their uteri, and that masturbation is a sign of "feeble-mindedness" that needs to be bred and sterilized out of the population.  There's a reason why we've got the stereotype of the mad scientist.  For Science!! has given us a lot of unfortunate notions when the foundation of the research was fundamentally unethical.

So no, I'm not just going to take a sticker labeled "SCIENTIFIC!!" and believe you over my own lived experience.  You may say "but that's not real science!" but your citation of The Bell Curve only informs me that you're not much better at sifting through good and bad scientific data than anyone else.

To say so would be completely ignorant of the fact that consumers find the exact strawman you present distasteful. Consumers are not idiots that have to have some enlightened soapboxer pointing out the obvious.

Its full extent is only obvious if you're living in the midsts of it.  Did everyone notice just how pervasive the negative female stereotypes were in video games?  I didn't.  I thought it was reasonable, seeing I knew from a very young age that women kind of suck and aren't good at anything.

[GlyphGryph]

I want to see a comparative analysis of Tropes vs Men in Romance Novels. Maybe Romantic Comedies worth a look too.

Actually, a lot of Romantic Comedies are pretty damn sexist, and a lot of their tropes are pretty incredibly sexist towards men. I think there's certainly plenty of material for "Sexist Tropes vs. Men" in the RomCom field. I'm not SURE if it would actually hold that they are particularly sexist overall (pretty much everyone in RomComs are terrible in their specific, stereotypical way), but I think it would be interesting to analyze and critique.

It's not really relevant to video games, though, where tropes of men being stupid, useless, and weak seem to be notably absent.

[Vector]

I dunno about Tropes vs. Men in Romance Novels, largely because I feel like porn is to be left alone.  Tropes vs. Men in RomCom movies, though, absolutely.  I don't enjoy them for other reasons (largely: they bore me), but men definitely get the short end of the stick there.

[Loud Whispers]

To say so would be completely ignorant of the fact that consumers find the exact strawman you present distasteful. Consumers are not idiots that have to have some enlightened soapboxer pointing out the obvious.

Its full extent is only obvious if you're living in the midsts of it.  Did everyone notice just how pervasive the negative female stereotypes were in video games?  I didn't.  I thought it was reasonable, seeing I knew from a very young age that women kind of suck and aren't good at anything.

You do not have to live in the midst of it to see blatant generalizations or shoddy writing. Most games are not sexist. Even better with modern games. Calling entire literary effects sexist is just mind numbing.

Scientific evidence has implied that autism is caused by vaccines.

/did not pass the scientific process/media selectively toting 12 anecdotes/not scientific evidence

[10ebbor10]

Yup, you gotta be carefull to keep pseudo science out of science.

Though these days there's an awfull lot of crap in science too. Results being made up or changed, dropping stuff, all that and more.